Is Amazon Video, now at 4.26% of U.S. Prime Time Downstream, Growing Fast Enough?

Given that Amazon Video is a big driver of Prime adoption-Jeff Bezos’ “flywheel”-, numbers on the usage of video in general and Amazon Video in particular are an interesting data point in figuring out how Amazon Prime is doing.

No one outside of Amazon knows how many people are streaming video from Amazon or how much video they are streaming. But industry observers do have a proxy: The internet usage numbers provided by Sandvine, a broadband services company that monitors this stuff.

And Sandvine says Amazon’s video now accounts for 4.26 percent of prime-time internet usage in the U.S.. That’s up from 1.31 percent three years ago.

That is a big increase. But taking into account that some researchers came to the conclusion that half of all U.S. households are Prime subscribers, one has to wonder why that number is not jumping higher faster. Especially compared to Netflix’ numbers, Amazon Video doesn’t seem to generate the same consumption behavior yet.

It is hard to know how accurate Sandvine’s numbers are. As Amazon refuses to publish any hard number on anything, it is hard to tell. Thanks to the increasingly complex nature of Prime and all its parts, it is becoming more difficult to assess from the outside how Amazon is doing.